Mapping Google News

CousinLarry writes "A neat project called Buzztracker.org has been mining Google News for over a year and keeping track of relationships between geographic locations mentioned in articles. The results are some really cool maps that actually seem to reflect the "buzz" of the day - check out the Vatican clusters from earlier this month, or the global New Year's chatter. You can also dig down into the articles from which the maps were generated."

Comments

virtual sightseeing

[tedtimmons]

not news (pun intended), but here is a compilation of neat google maps I've been collecting:

http://perljam.net/notes/interesting-google-satell ite-maps/

-ted

Nelson Mandela != Nelson town

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like the code needs a bit more tuning. http://www.buzztracker.org/index.html lists Nelson, NZ, as one of the hot spots. Clicking on that lists a bunch of articles about apartheid. I think the site code misinterpreted a reference to Nelson Mandela in one of the articles.

Does Google mind?

[IBeatUpNerds]

I remember about a year ago or so, there was a guy who was mining google news to produce an RSS feed. IIRC, google politely demanded that individual stop offering this to people. I can't find the article to cite this, maybe someone can help? At any rate, I wonder how google will feel about this.

Animations

[Doctor O]

Now, take the data and put up some nice animations, archive the first 100 articles or so and put it into some nice database to mine for interesting stuff. Should not be too hard to script together the data gathering, you can already start fetching stuff while developing the functionality and frontend.

Someone wanna join? This cries 'distributed database'... ;)

This is pretty nifty

[aftk2]

While mapping the news activity over the whole world is certainly cool, I can see this having an even greater effect when applied to a smaller area. For example, if you're moving somewhere, you could easily see crime news applied to the particular region. It doesn't have all have to be depressing news, either: you could use such a "buzz" indication to find out information like the following:

• find where there are lots of new jobs being generated
• view up-and-coming areas by their positive "buzz" (new creative hot spots, architecture, etc...)
• find areas of town with great new restaurants

I think this is where it starts to get exciting (and more useful). Mapping Google news? Meh. Mapping the northwest, and giving that information to Citysearch? You betcha.

Through With Buzz

[Doc Ruby]

The big circle in the US is called "Washington", which is rated at 03%. It obscures "New York" in the GUI. Boston is available, and the only other US buzz is Grand Rapids, apparently on the strength of a local paper's report 2 days ago of a resident killed in Cairo. I find all that hard to believe, or at least to make into any sense. The GUI is unusable, and the mapping of data to "reality" defies sensibility. I think the buzz has gone to their heads, and they should put the pipe down quick.

Why do we need this?

[A Sea and Cake]

Why do we need this?

A map that showed where the stories getting the least attention that contained certain keywords - famine, Schiavo, wobbegong, whatever - came from would strike me as more interesting.

We already know where the stories indicated by this map are coming from, because they're taking up ridiculous amounts of space on the front pages of newspapers everywhere.